“I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS,” trumpeted Donald Trump on his Twitter knockoff site, in the wake of the passage of a widely-reported new law in Louisiana. Trump wasn’t exactly lying, for once, as he went on to explain: It was all about the branding. The commandments should be displayed, he wrote, “IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”
The hysterical disconnect between professed and practiced religiosity is with us always, but this hyperbolic extreme, which barely caused a ripple in the media, is worth serious reflection, both on its own and to fully appreciate the significance and multiple contradictions embedded in and surrounding the Louisiana law that elicited Trump's enthusiastic endorsement. The law itself follows from the Project Blitz playbook (described here in 2018), which laid out a three-tiered framework intended to advance a Christian supremacist, if not dominionist, agenda. Though Project Blitz later went into stealth mode, associated figures such as Texas-based pseudo-historian David Barton and Gene Mills, head of the Louisiana Family Forum, openly claimed credit for the bill. It would clearly be considered unconstitutional under established judicial precedent, but the current Supreme Court supermajority — with three justices appointed by Trump — no longer cares about that. The Constitution means whatever they say it means, apparently, and precedent be damned.
